Almost nonchalant, I pulled the shotgun from my backpack and strode toward her purposefully. Getting to her knees, she raised a dirt-smeared hand defensively, coughing out muck onto the ground as she attempted to talk. Only strangled sounds emerged from her mouth.
“Finally, I don’t have to hear any more lies,” I said.
“W-wainn,” she slurred, thrusting her palm at me repeatedly. She scraped at her mouth with her fingers, pulling out a wad of grit. “Wait, Brant.”
“I’m not waiting any longer. You had your chance.”
“No, please.”
“Listen carefully. I better start getting some answers.” The wind sprung up again, colder than before. Long strands of auburn hair danced across her filthy face. “I better start getting answers right now.”
“Okay.” She blinked and wiped at the dirt in her eyes. “Okay.”
“The plantation, on the west side,” I said. “I know it’s yours.”
“Yes.”
“You created it.”
“Yes. I created it.”
“Why did you abandon it?”
She coughed up more dirt. “It was too far away to maintain.”
I raised the shotgun, pointed it right at her, pumped a round into the chamber. “Stop lying.”
“Okay, okay. There’s bad memories there for me. That’s all. Bad memories.”
“What bad memories?”
She gave me a sour smile. “You have your demons, Brant. Remember those? Well, I have mine too.”
“There were humans living there, weren’t there?”
She looked away from me, put a hand to her mouth as if she couldn’t bring herself to speak. “I uh…”
“Was it us? Was the Displacer real?”
Her eyes met mine again, and confusion seemed to seep into them. “What?”
“Were you keeping the human Brant and Arsha there?”
She stared at me, dumbfounded. “Is that what this is about?”
“Answer me!”
“No. I told you, those memories weren’t real. The Displacer was a fantasy, Brant. It was never real. We were never human.”
I still couldn’t bring myself to trust what she was saying. “Then why are you so hell-bent on stopping me digging in that grave?”
She lifted her hand again, this time to her brow, covering her eyes as if she had suddenly succumbed to a headache. She just shook her head.
“I want to hear you say it, Arsha, if it’s the last thing I do.” The anger was rising within me. “What did you do? What have you been keeping from me? I want to hear you say it!”
Her hand dropped away, and I could see tears had carved lines down her cheeks through the grime. Her face was stony and bleak like granite and her eyes were hollow, as if the conduit to her heart had broken, and they were now nothing more than empty orbs of glass wallowing in their sockets. Her lips pried apart, sticky and brown with dirt, but no sound came out.
We stared at each other, and at that moment I realised that perhaps she was willing to take her secrets to the grave. The words that were welling up inside her and trying to escape her throat seemed to terrify her more than the prospect of death itself.
“I failed,” she said finally.
“Failed? Failed what?”
Tears dripped from her chin. “How can I admit it to you, when I can’t even admit it to myself?”
“Admit what? Arsha, tell me.”
But she could only stare at me. She gasped as a sob wracked her body, and finally her face began to lose its rigidity. Her eyes narrowed and her lips trembled as more tears spilled down her cheeks, and she made a soft keening sound.
I felt wetness on my own face and reeled back. Lifting a hand to my cheek, I brushed at my skin and my fingers came away stained black.
“What’s happening?” I said, dumbfounded, but Arsha just sat on the ground, shaking her head. “What’s going on?”
There were more spots of black emerging on my skin. On my arms, my hands. Arsha watched me, unmoving. I almost lost my grip on the shotgun, snatched it back. What was happening? What had she done to me? Was I melting apart from the inside? Was this some kind of synthetic virus? I grasped at my skin, panicked. Hysteria was clawing at my periphery and threatening to overwhelm me.
Then I saw it was happening to her, too. Spots of black were appearing on her arms, her face, her clothes, sliding downward across her skin like liquefied slugs.
“Brant, I don’t understand…” she began. She sounded disoriented, disconnected. For the first time since she’d confronted me, I believed what she said.
“Arsha, are we…?” I tried to calm myself, tried to think coherently. If Arsha hadn’t caused this, where was it coming from?
I lifted my face to the sky, to the malevolent ceiling that had so recently grown like a cancer above, and understanding came.
It was raining. Black rain was falling from the murk above.
The event, unworldly as it was, made me feel like I was losing my grip on reality. It was almost as if I’d fallen through cracks in the earth in the last few hours, and that I’d somehow plummeted into the depths of Hell. What other explanation could there be? Everything I’d known was falling apart, and now death and hopelessness had even begun to manifest in the physical world itself.
“It’s rain,” I said, rubbing the moisture between my fingers. “Black rain.”
“What’s happening to us, Brant?” Arsha said, numb.
“It’s soot, or something from that murk above.” I regathered my thoughts, brought the shotgun up again. “We don’t have time for this, Arsha. I need you to tell me the truth. Now.”
She just looked at me bleakly. “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”
I stepped toward her again, anger twisting my features. I felt unhinged, capable of anything.
“Speak!” I snarled. “What’s in the grave? Tell me now, or so help me I’ll–”
“It’s a child!” Arsha screamed at me, stopping me in my tracks. The fire returned briefly to her eyes, full of resentment now that I had extracted the words from her, and she looked as though she might climb to her feet and try to claw my throat out. I held the shotgun firm, not backing down. Then her energy ebbed away again and she relented. Sobbing, she averted her face. “It’s a child. It’s a little girl.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
Arsha sank back and wiped more tears from her face, creating great tracks of filth under her eyes. The black rain was coming down harder now, thumping into the roadway and onto the roofs of houses along the street. The noise was deafening.
“It’s my greatest failure,” she said helplessly. I moved closer so that I could hear her.
“A child?” I shouted. “What child? What girl?”
“Why do you think I engineered those embryos, Brant? Didn’t you ever wonder about my motivation for that?”
“You said you wanted stronger specimens.”
“Yeah. And now you know why. I’d been down that road before.”
“When? How?”
She motioned awkwardly with her hands. “You were gone. You walked off into the desert, and you didn’t come back. I waited years, okay? Years. There was no sign of you. I thought you’d been lost out there, and that you were never going to return. So I went ahead with our mission.”
“What did you do?”
“I took embryos out of cryostorage. Five embryos. I took them out, and placed them inside the a-wombs. I started the procedure.” She looked at me, entreating. “They were unengineered embryos. You’ve seen what happens. You’ve seen how hard it is. It was hopeless. I lost two early, and two more a few months in. There just seemed no way to keep them alive. Whether it was deterioration in the embryos or in the a-wombs themselves, I guess I’ll never know. But only one made it through to full term, and when she came out she was barely clinging to life.
“The plantation in the west was my first. I liked the location because it was secluded. The soil there seemed good. A good match f
or what I was trying to grow. So after she was born, I took the infant there, the little girl, and I… I did everything I could to keep her alive. She was so weak, there were so many problems. So many things went wrong. She couldn’t even feed properly. I couldn’t nourish her. I… I couldn’t save her, Brant. She lived a week, or maybe two weeks. I’m not sure exactly how long. It was a living Hell. I tried to save her, I really did. But in the end I failed her.”
She stared up at me as the black rain cascaded down her face. Thunder rumbled in the distance. “After she passed, I wrapped her in swaddling and carried her out of there,” she went on. “I brought her to the cemetery and dug a grave for her, and I buried her where she could look out across the city. And I never went back to that plantation. I couldn’t. I still can’t. What you saw there is how I left it the day I walked out.
“Then, a year later you walked back into my life. When you returned to the city, I wondered if you’d find the plantation out there in the west. I wanted to tell you about it so many times, believe me, I truly did, but I knew you’d think less of me if you found out, if you knew I’d wasted the embryos and let those unborn children die. I considered going back there to destroy the plantation, but I couldn’t face it. It’s the greatest reminder of everything I did wrong.
“So I left it there, knowing that if one day you found it, I’d have to own up to what I did. I just never expected you to take it this badly. I mean, god. I never thought you’d head to the cemetery to try to dig up my little girl, or that we’d end up pointing guns at each other.”
The throbbing lump of anger in my chest had transmuted into pity. “Arsha, I thought it was all about the Displacer. I didn’t realise…”
“No. Like I said, that was never real. This is much worse.” She smiled bitterly. “I just… I know I kept this from you, but I never wanted you to find out, to know what I’d done. I’ve tried so hard to be the strong one, to be the perfect one. The rock. You don’t know how hard it’s been.”
Looking at her slumped in the dirt, I realised that Arsha was just as fragile as me. She outwardly projected such an air of surety and coolness, but underneath she’d doubted, she’d made mistakes. She’d suffered. The self-assurance she’d built around herself was a facade, a wall to keep the world at bay. It was a thick skin she’d grown in order to cope with this hopeless, god forsaken earth, where every mistake was amplified, stretched and contorted. A place where every wrong move could mean the loss of an entire civilisation. She’d felt the burden on her shoulders just as keenly as I had, perhaps even more so.
I’d compared myself to her so many times, feeling unworthy, but now I realised that was futile. I didn’t have anything to prove to her, and she had nothing to prove to me. We were just two people caught up in a terrible situation, trying to deal with it as best we could. At times we’d overcome great odds and shown great strength. At other times we’d both failed, each in our own different way.
I’d spent so much time wishing I could emulate her poise, her assuredness, when really we weren’t so different after all.
This confrontation at the bottom of the hill had been borne out of both of our faults: her foolish pride, and my overreaction, jumping to conclusions when I should have thought things through.
Standing there above her, I now felt very foolish. The shotgun seemed to weigh a tonne. The weight of my guilt. I let it drop and then cast it aside, repulsed.
I reached down, extending my hand to Arsha. She looked at it, uncertain, and then reached hesitantly with her own. I clasped it and pulled her to her feet, embraced her.
“I’m sorry, Arsha. For everything.”
She sobbed again, pressed herself against me with all her might, allowing all of the guilt and regret to wash away through tears that had been held back for too long. I understood it all too well. I’d once experienced a moment just like this, in a far away place where my thoughts and emotions had collided, causing me to confront my fears and to re-evaluate who I was. It was a moment that had changed me for the better, and I hoped that Arsha too might find some cathartic release in the outpouring of her tears.
“What happened after you buried her?” I said gently.
Arsha pulled back, trying to reign in her emotions. “I, uh… I got to work on the embryos. Bioengineering, enhancing them in every way I could. So that this would never happen again. That’s why I tried to dissuade you from using the natural embryos. I thought you’d fail, just as I had. But you proved me wrong.”
“I got lucky. Atlas is a one of a kind.”
“Yeah.”
“What was her name? The little girl?”
“I never named her. I thought that by doing that it might somehow make it easier to let her go, that she would somehow mean less to me because of it. But it didn’t help.” She grimaced and placed her fingers on her mouth. “God, Brant, I still miss her so much. I miss the smell and the feel of her, her tiny fingers and toes. The little noises she made in those rare moments where she seemed content. I had so many dreams for her, so many things I wanted her to achieve. They’re all lost, now. All of that potential is lost.”
“No. We’ve regained it again. We have the children.”
The downpour wasn’t letting up, but above us the murk seemed to lessen, as if the raindrops had scoured away the filth from the sky and left an opening through which the sun could finally peek. A soft golden glow fell across the street, the heavens at last smiling down upon us and giving us hope. Then the moment passed and the gloom closed in again.
“I’m so sorry, Brant,” Arsha said. “I should have told you all of this a long time ago. The truth is, I’ve never really come to grips with my failure. And I can’t abide the thought of failing again. That’s why I tried to blame you every time something went wrong. I couldn’t accept that it might be me who’d done the wrong thing. I understand that now.”
“It’s all right, Arsha.”
“No, it was totally unfair. I’ve treated you like shit, Brant. I’ve driven you away for no reason. You didn’t deserve this.”
I reached out and brushed a clump of mud from her cheek. “From now on, we work together, right? We do what’s best for the children. Nothing comes between us.”
She smiled self-consciously and nodded. “Okay. Nothing comes between us. I–”
She stopped suddenly, and the smile wilted from her face. She pushed away from me, scampering over to scoop the handgun from the dirt, and I felt panic intruding on my newly arrived sense of relief.
“Arsha, what the hell–”
But she was already sprinting past me up the hill. “Brant, run!” she called without looking back, her arms pumping, hair whipping behind her.
I moved to retrieve the shotgun from the road, confused. Swinging it up onto my shoulder, I began to follow her, and it was only then that I saw the cluster of headlights glaring at the top of the hill.
28
We ascended Somerset Drive at breakneck speed. Slick from the rain, the asphalt was difficult to negotiate at such a rapid clip. Arsha took a spill, and as I reached her I helped her to her feet. We kept going with Arsha favouring an ankle, but she gritted her teeth through the discomfort and did not let her pace relent.
My mind clamoured with unwanted thoughts, and a crushing sense of guilt assaulted me as I considered what I’d done. The events of the last few hours flashed through my mind: the courtyard, the garden, the fury I’d felt at being deceived. The confrontation with Arsha. This crusade for truth had led to a reconciliation with her, and that was the one positive I could take out of the whole episode. In the end we’d finally achieved a kind of honesty with each other. But what price were we about to pay for that? To whom did those vehicles at the top of the hill belong, and what did they want?
I wondered what was going through Arsha’s head. Most likely she was thinking the same thing as me – that we’d made horrible mistakes: her by deceiving me and not telling me the truth about the embryos, and me by overreacting to the discovery of the
garden. Those decisions might now have jeopardised everything we’d spent all these years working toward.
A gunshot rang out, and then another, and I heard laughter through the rain.
“Oh god, no,” Arsha said. “It’s them. It’s the Marauders.”
I wondered how on earth they’d gotten so close without us hearing them, but then I realised that their approach had been masked by the deafening noise of the rain. The reality also dawned on me that the noise I’d thought was thunder in the distance had most likely been the rumble of engines.
At the head of the street I could now make out more details of the vehicles. Several of them had the distinctive shape of the dirt bikes used by the Marauders, and there was a larger vehicle there as well. An off-roader.
“It’s Wraith,” I whispered hoarsely, grabbing Arsha by the arm and pulling her to the side of the street where we’d be less visible. “He’s found us.”
There was no one by the vehicles, however. It seemed that they’d already proceeded on foot, fanning out amongst the buildings.
“We have to get to the house,” Arsha hissed.
“This way.” I pointed away from the street. “Through the back yard.”
We scaled several fences, crouching low as we headed toward the plantation. Eerily, there had been no further noise around us since the gunshots apart from the rain. There was no chatter of children, no sound of the Marauders yelling or committing acts of violence. No sounds of life at all. It was just like any of the other empty, deserted neighbourhoods in other parts of the city.
As we reached the corn stalks in the back yard of our home, I clasped Arsha’s shoulder and drew her lower.
“Listen, get the kids and go. Bring them back out here and just run. I can hold up the Marauders long enough to give you time to escape.”
She didn’t argue, just nodded and headed off between the garden plots on her way to the back door. Once there, Arsha’s fingers closed around the door handle and she eased it open. The creak of it was like a banshee screaming in the otherwise quiet house.
Inside, candles were lit, but the house was deserted. The children’s picture books were strewn across the floor of their room, and one of Mish’s gnomes lay broken in the kitchen. There were no other signs of struggle, no blood.
The Seeds of New Earth Page 23
